All the hopeless carnage he’d experienced only proved to him that greed, pride and blindness, once rolled together, created a mechanism of appalling velocity, and that humans outside of imagination are best kept caged and regulated by severe controls. Never, in all the conflict and the infinity of wounds, had his love and enthusiasm for the firearms changed. Yes, these beautifully designed and crafted machines had only one purpose, but they did not breed it. He knew that their sole purpose, the taking of life, would have been operated anyway, even if the tools at hand had been sharpened sticks and heavy stones. Indeed, he had seen trench warfare move into hand-to-hand combat, where the bayonet was too distant a weapon, where handmade clubs and honed steel had hacked flesh apart in slippery, sightless fury. If men were to be butchered, then better it be done professionally, with a precise tool in skilled hands. With this dislocation as a balm, he could continue.
He had been unpacking a crate of Lee-Enfield rifles when he realised, to his surprise, that they were not reconditioned stock as expected, but a batch of gleaming new models in mint condition. In fact, none of the order had matched his paperwork at all. There were odd and unusual boxes in the shipment which were not mentioned elsewhere, and he had begun to feel a glowing excitement, the thrill of being gifted with all sorts of treasures in a place at the end of all caring.
He understood little of the local people. Their language was impenetrable, their ways oblique, and though their humanity was blatant from the beginning, all of their methods were questionable. But he had begun to be fascinated by the way they watched without looking, bemused by their laughter, which seemed disconnected to events, and intrigued by their shock at new objects and gestures. In fact, his curiosity was fusing him to them in direct proportion to the extent that he was becoming separated from all the other colonists of the outpost. He had not known this. His day-to-day work of demonstrating the weapons and organising target practice had consumed introspection and nullified his nagging doubts. It was only the incident with the girl and the angels that forced his dislocation and pinned him up against isolation and the threat of court martial.
The Dutch priest was a man of one gear: forward. A dauntless missionary, he had finished his church in a record two months. It was filled with the faithful every day, or at least what looked like the faithful. But on this day it sounded woefully empty as he stood outside, sheepishly peering into the moaning interior. A group of onlookers had started to form around the newly painted entrance steps and the abnormality could be heard by nearly the whole village.
‘Padre, what’s wrong?’ asked the first of the senior officers to arrive at the priest’s side.
‘It’s one of the women,’ he replied. ‘She has gone mad.’
The lieutenant pushed past the priest and opened the double doors to take control. The church still smelt of paint, its whiteness disorientating and off-key. In the aisle, halfway to the altar, a young woman knelt on the floor, surrounded by books, with one heavy foolscap tome open before her. She was naked and menstruating heavily. A low, inhuman groan rumbled constantly from deep inside her, the kind of sound that is heard at a distance, from the centre of a glacier, or lethally close, when it growls from the sleek, unseen darkness of a big cat.
The lieutenant looked back to the priest and understood his reticence. ‘It’s only a girl,’ he said, the greatest lie he could manage, because he too had begun to shrink back in fear. His testicles were sucked up into his pelvis and his hair was standing on end. Whatever was in the church was a girl only in the curves of its black surface: its essence and action were not from the known world. What was in the girl was altogether alien to a trained modern mind, and it was rewriting the rules of phenomena in a language that had an irremediable taste of pure terror.
A second officer and a group of onlookers had begun to bustle at the entrance of the church. The officer had a revolver in his hand already, and had pushed it through the door like a crucifix, ready to dominate anything into submission. He saw a blur that shivered. Its sound unbound him, made him want to flee. He smelt the fear of all those around him and his bladder started to weaken and leak. Pointing his shaking defence down the length of the aisle at the hideous black confusion, he shut his eyes and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. The hammer had dropped, but only onto the flesh of the left-hand ring finger of Peter Williams. He had grabbed the pistol and restricted the action, twisting it around and down, forcing his colleague to his knees in yelps of pain. He took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. After looking down the aisle for a moment, he walked to the young woman, knelt beside her and closed the book. The silence was instant, the fears and shuddering vanishing immediately.
‘Coat,’ he called back to the door.
Moments later one had arrived, and was brought almost to him, it being thrown for the last few feet. He covered the girl and helped her to stand, then slowly escorted her from the church, a trail of blood left on the new floor. Once outside, he had expected her to walk off or to be collected by one of her own. But this did not happen. Instead, every time he stopped, so did she; when he moved, she began to walk. So they walked out of the camp together, and thirty minutes later they were deep in the bush.
It was then that he stopped to look at her, wiping the sweat from his face with the backs of his hands. She was now calm and without the faintest sign of perspiration. Lifting her head, she stared through him, her eyes the colour of opals, bright and unnervingly clear as they gazed into a distance that he preferred to ignore. Then she spoke a word that seemed out of sequence with her mouth: ‘Irrinipeste’.
He did not understand until she said it again. He heard it deep in the back of his head, in a place where the old brain skulked. Only part of it clung, and he repeated it: ‘Este’.
She nodded a kind of agreement and waited. To hear his name, perhaps? He said it slowly. Halfway through its second pronouncement, she started to twitch, then shake. He thought that perhaps she was going to spasm again; the blood was flowing down her legs at an alarming rate. But she gathered herself and walked forward, pulling him behind her.
They walked on, into a clearing with six or seven large and ornately decorated dwellings. A few chickens scurried about in their passing, and a peacock watched them and shrilled. He looked about them and was ready to call out, when the old man was suddenly there. His tattooed and bangled arms held out for the girl. She folded into them and let Williams leave the clearing. As he looked back, he saw her beauty standing between them. It was detached, older and breathtaking.
On a brilliant sunlit morning, I shoot the next arrow. The curve of its fletching sings in the vibrant air as it flies out over my path of hard stone, which rises into the distant hills.
With each step I seem to climb out of the past, lift away from the flat gravity of waiting. From now on, memories will only flow forwards and await my arrival, the way it happens in dreams, where they give continuity and momentum. In the same way, the arrows went before to sense the void, taste its colour and name its happenstance. She had written my understanding of this high in the continual pathway. What waited in my dreams to resume the path will be explained to me between the flights of the arrows. My walking between them will unravel the knowledge, while my feet erase the path of all arrivals.
Stout yeoman Mutter pulled the gate closed on his Sunday morning duties in 4 Kühler Brunnen. He turned the key in the heavy lock which jarred against its closure, causing him to totter in the street. A tarry, wet cigar, chewed into the corner of his badly shaven mouth, accentuated his shallow breath in the cold air. He was returning home to the rich, swollen musk of his wife’s lunch, and his attention was slurred between last night’s schnapps and the saturated sleep that wallowed on the other side of the thick food of the afternoon; perhaps that is why the lock wasn’t quite properly engaged and he fumbled the keys, dropping them into the icy mire.